Law for Computer Scientists (2020)
lawforcomputerscientists.pubpub.org
lawforcomputerscientists.pubpub.org
I now have the very nerdy perspective that law is the operating system our socially run on. Laws are small snippets of code similar to a predicate in Prolog. We apply them once the conditions are fulfilled.
In other words, the relationship is more like recipes versus cooking. People cooked foods first-- possibly many many times--and then formalized them later with documentation and rules to help make an outcome transferable or fast.
However, it would be a mistake to think that just because recipes are ubiquitous, they are a prerequisite for the process.
Economy is also a large scale self adjusting optimizer, logistical neural network ?
So the idea that the law actually exists, and we just have to find it, doesn't seem correct. Given that judges were usually barristers before, it's more like: one barrister confidently argues that the law has always been X, the opposing barrister confidently argies it's always been Y, the former-barrister confidently argues that it has always been Z - and that one always wins.
(Though in practice precedence seems to have about equal value in common law and civil law jurisdictions. In common law, the court just has to nitpick enough to find a difference between the current case and the precedent, to argue why the latter should not apply. In civil law, courts routinely defer to precedence as a matter of convention and habit.)
Which makes sense if you think about it.
That's a very government centric point of view.
Compare https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik...
See also the exokernel papers like https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2008/readings/engler95exoke... or via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel
Traditional operating systems try to help programs securely share resources, but also want to provide abstractions away from the raw hardware. An exokernel approach limits itself to just the secure multiplexing, and delegates abstractions to another mechanism much better suited for the task: user space libraries.
To close out the tangent: I wonder how you would bring this metaphor back to laws? I guess it would have something to do with Subsidiarity? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
The basic mechanisms of UK law are more similar to US law than to French law. The actual laws on the books are probably the other way around, though.
-common law depends more on courts to make and refine legal decisions -civil law relies more on regulators.
In civil law countries it's more common for the statutes (governing text) to be longer and go into great detail. In common law countries you see some extremely short laws - like the Sherman act in US Antitrust law is like 2 sentences long.
That's the common understanding. These days though both EU and US are converging a bit in their approach.
The US legal system relies more on "ex post" legal enforcement - meaning, if you break the law then you get busted and you personally pay the victim. Europe is a more "ex ante" system - they rely on regulators to strictly define what the law should look like exactly and actually requires industry to do very specific things to comply with it. If someone gets hurt the system compensates them from a fund. The person who hurt them doesn't necessarily pay.
That's the theoretical underpinning and difference in our systems. But like I said the systems have a bit of both these days. Eu is flirting with more class actions, and US has more regulatory scrutiny in certain sectors, like California privacy laws for example being very detailed.
In contrast, German military procurement is famous for its endless lawsuits.
In the US, there's basically no downside of suing someone if you can keep your own costs down.
Only wanted to provide an accurate take, your overall point I agree with though
[0]: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-3055/pdf/COMPS-305...
If the act itself is only 2 pages that is a marvel, though. Usually they spend at least ten explaining why they are passing a law and who they are.
For example, I turned to a random part about copyright:
"In the continental European tradition, the focus has been on the author and the work. This understanding of ‘authors’ law’ built on the Age of Romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where the singularity of creative im- agination of an individual author took precedence over the mundane business interests of a publisher. The idea was that ‘authors’ law’ is part of ‘natural law’ rather than being ‘posited’ by a legislator (positive law). The ‘authors’ right’, in that line of thinking, is constituted by the original act of creation of the author and should not be tied to formalities (such as registration), while the ‘work’ that is created belongs to the ‘author’s domain’. This is a matter of per- sonality rights (droit moral or moral right), rather than a matter of ownership (as Locke would have it).
In the common law that inspired the United Kingdom and the United States, the focus was not on the author and their work, but on the original and the copy. This was less a matter of personality and romantic imagination than a matter of pragmatism. Copyright was simply a choice made by a legislator (positive law), rather than a natural right inherent in the author’s act of cre- ation. This led to the requirement of registration and an emphasis on copy- right as an economic, not a moral right. Here, copyright law is about the domain of the ‘work’ rather than the domain of the ‘author’, and such work is considered original in the sense of not being copied, rather than original in the sense of being creative or novel"
This is a topic I am very interested in, but since I am from the US I would prefer to start with law as practiced here.
Edit: only skimmed and it seems this book may be both EU and UK focused. Seems to be funded by the EU European Research Council but published by Oxford?
Up until recently, the UK was part of the EU and researchers across the EU received grant funding from EU ERC for various research projects. Then something happened, I'm not quite sure what.
https://www.amazon.com/Legal-Singularity-Artificial-Intellig...
I fine these primers almost always focus too much on technicalities and don't make the takeaways sufficiently obvious.
https://www.amazon.com/Legal-Singularity-Artificial-Intellig...
Lawyer in tech here. I find these types of articles often disappointing because the focus on technicalities rather than the real takeaways. For example, the article points out <x> but the take away is <y> <insert explanation> <repeat 0-2 more times>. If anyone has additional questions I'd be happy to answer
I think this would generate more engagement. Personally, I have so little knowledge in this space I don't even know what a good question to ask is. I suspect that this is quite common but that it's unlikely to be admitted. You know how us CS people are, we spend a weekend hacking on something and declare domain expertise lol.
EDIT: Get the whole copy (not everything seems to be on the website) from here:
https://www.cohubicol.com/assets/uploads/law_for_computer_sc...
I think this is the case for most fields with respect to programming.
That is the same level of interaction as your example.
I agree that "using a computer" is an experience most people will have a similar exposure to as they have to legal matters.
"Programming" is more analogous to writing litigation documents or contracts, where formal errors tend to have very bad consequences.
The typical programmer thinks they know far more about the law, than a typical lawyer thinks they know about programming.
But more importantly, there are areas of the law that require fairly comprehensive understanding of computer systems, both on the development, infrastructure and applications such as data science to properly understand. (Not understanding the tech makes it impossible to fully understand the law).
For instance, if an average lawyer tasked with ensuring that a company is in compliance with GDPR, and come across terminology such as "Data Protection by Design & Default" with further references to "Pseudonymization" and "Anonymization", will they even know how to start a review of the present situation in an organization for these topics?
My experience is that there is often a significant gap between where the understanding of the legal team ends and where the development and data science teams take responsibility that isn't covered by anyone.
The main problem is that legal coverage of data protection topics (such as [1]) often do not prescribe very specific specifications for how to be compliant. Instead, it requires people to use good judgement. Someone with a background in law will be used to this, but will usually not understand the technology well enough to have developed the kind of intuition needed to do so.
And when they sit down with a team of typical engineers, communication can get really difficult. The engineers tend to want very specific instructions on what to do, and many will not react well if confronted with the relatively loose (for an engineer) legal language.
Some will just ignore the parts they don't understand, while others will go to the other extreme and propose draconian measures that will at best be extremely costly. The latter group tends to be ignored by management.
In the end, many compliance initiatives end up with a lot of forms that serve as little more than window dressing, but where the hard bits that nobody really understand end up ignored.
To really achieve compliance, an organization will need people who are (in the same person) able to read legal texts with a lawyer's ability to interpret combined with the ability think like a black hat hacker trying to penetrate, a paranoid operations person terrified of data loss or a shady data scientist that keeps taking all sorts of shortcuts.
Few organizations have such lawyers available.
[1] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...